Hans-johann Glock Animal Minds: Conceptual Problems

This essay is an expanded version of my Antrittsvorlesung ‘Können Tiere Denken?’ at the University of Zurich, 02.04.2007. A Spanish translation will appear as a monograph La Mente de los Animales. (Oviedo, KRK Ediciones) in 2008. The essay discusses the problems which concepts pose for the attribution of thoughts to (non-human) animals. It first locates these problem within a range of other issues concerning animal minds (sct. 1). It then distinguishes three positions: Davidsonian lingualism denies that non-linguistic animals have any thoughts or concepts; mentalism maintains that their thoughts differ from ours only in degree; an intermediate position maintains that animals can have thoughts of a simple kind (sct. 2). Next I argue that the topic of animal minds should be approached from a third-person perspective (sct. 3). The article opts for an intermediate position by considering those arguments for lingualism which trade on the connection between thoughts and concepts: the argument from the intensional nature of thought (sct. 4); the idea that thoughts involve concepts (scts. 5-8); the holistic argument from the logical connections created by concepts (sct. 9). I conclude that there is a kind of perceptual thought that does not require concepts and that concept-possession is not tied to language, but to the capacity of making discriminations that are subject to normative assessment. At the same time, even the ascription of simple thoughts to animals employs a rich idiom with conceptual connections that go beyond the phenomena to which it is applied (sct. 10). The original essay is followed by two postscripts. The first conveys my more recent reflections on the ‘lingualist master-argument’ according to which thought requires concepts and that concepts require language. The second places the essay in a wider context, as regards both my own work and the current anthropological debate about how much we resemble our biological relatives.